Fiction River: How to Save the World Read online

  I saved the world daily.

  Deedee Franken, the girl across the street, used to make fun of me. But I would race over to her front yard and save all the dolls that had been, until that very moment, sitting calmly in chairs lined up around a small wooden table that I still remember quite vividly had been painted white. They hadn’t realized that one of the attendees at their tea party (the stuffed thing that looked like a purple puppet with red lips sewn on at the wrong angle) was, in fact, Mrs. Peabrain, and that Mrs. Peabrain was really an evil dictator who had been plotting to take over the world’s supply of nuclear material. She and her cronies were always nearly ready to enact her evil plan that would turn us all into radioactive zombies.

  We moved from that house before high school.

  I think Deedee became a dental hygienist.

  I eventually gave up my cape and my fake webslingers. But I never gave up my geekitude, nor the desire to actually be Super Spider-Man. It’s just that reality eventually makes you shoot for something a little more mundane, and it turns out that one of the things I liked most about superheroes is that they each had their own secret identity—which was important because as I grew up, I found that people made me uncomfortable. They weren’t like machines or the laws of physics. They didn’t do the same thing every time. A wheel, though, was dependable. It went around, taking the car the same distance with every rotation, and the sun moved the same way every day—varying only slightly, and even then in ways that were predictable if you watched the pattern for long enough.

  I liked things to make sense.

  And I found I could talk to the world through mathematics and science in ways that I didn’t feel comfortable with in other ways. I could hide in the elegant complexity of the ideas behind science in the same way as Peter Parker hid behind his Spider-Man alter ego.

  So I traded my cape and my dreams of flying over the city in red and blue tights for long hours packing books and staring into microscopes and doing a multitude of other things that kids who eventually become scientists do.

  It’s cool stuff, of course.

  But it’s no Super Spider-Man.

  Except, of course, that it is—or at least it was going to be. After seeing what R. eutreepa was capable of, I had actually come to think that I, Mark Dupree from little Vincennes, Indiana, was actually going to save the world.

  Until today.

  ***

  I needed air.

  I stripped off my lab coat as I stormed down the hallway, and dropped it on the wide ledge of a window well before I pushed through the door and ran down the stairway. I was outside before I realized what was happening.

  It was late February, but already the grassy patch that ran along Tech Drive was a spongy mat of deep green. The record temperature hung in the low 70s, and I could smell Lake Michigan in the breeze. Spring was coming earlier and earlier. It felt good. This global warming thing was all right as long as you didn’t own oceanfront property or think too hard about what spring in February meant for the environment as a whole.

  The usual scattering of students sat on blankets in the grass, studying and eating the normal crap they ate for lunch, while others bounced a soccer ball between them. A girl, obviously a freshman, lay out in the sun, her legs exposed under tiny shorts and her shirt pulled up over her belly. Guys looked at her, of course, me included. I was pissed off, after all. Not dead.

  I walked up the street against the traffic. The fresh air cleared my cobwebs.

  My first rational thought was that Mom would tell me not to worry, but Dad would be pissed. “We’re not paying for another three years of school,” he would say. “Go get a job.”

  “What’s up?” It was Calley Buchanan, a junior ChemE from Nebraska.

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  She fell into step beside me, her overlarge purse slung over her shoulder, and her long, straight hair catching the breeze.

  We had kind of dated once or twice a year ago. Pizza and video games. Nothing serious. She hadn’t seemed too interested in me, which was the norm for my dating life. What was unusual, though, was that we were still friends. Calley pretty much defined the entire set of “girls on the face of the earth who had gone out with me and still found me less boring than dirt.”

  “You look like your dog just died, but that can’t be true because I know you don’t have one.”

  “Monro’s canceling my project.”

  “No way!”

  “Three years of work, blown to bits.”

  “You can’t be serious. What happened?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “That completely blows.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “Three goddamned years,” I said. “It was all I had.”

  “I can’t believe it. Just when you got it working.”

  “How did you know that?”

  Her comment kind of pissed me off. It felt too close, somehow, too intimate. My success was mine.

  She laughed. “I saw you at O’Malley’s Saturday night.”

  I put my head down and pushed my hands into my front pockets. “I’m sorry. I didn’t remember.”

  “You were pretty drunk.”

  “I don’t usually do that.”

  “Yeah, I could tell.”

  “If that’s supposed to be some kind of cut on my masculinity, I really don’t need that right now.”

  “No, I’m sorry, Mark,” Calley said. “It wasn’t that at all.”

  We stopped at a light, waiting in silence. It turned, and we moved.

  “That really just doesn’t make any sense,” Calley said. “Why would Monro cancel a project that’s working?”

  Her question stopped me in my tracks.

  “Crap…” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s it. It works. That’s why she’s cancelling it!”

  “That doesn’t make any sense either. She’s cancelling it because it worked?”

  “I am so goddamned stupid.”

  This time she waited for me.

  “We’ve talked about it a hundred times before,” I said. “But I never really put it together right. Monro spent all of last Friday with bigwigs from three of the world’s major energy companies. No surprise there, of course. Happens all the time. She’s a goddamned rock star. You can’t throw a dead cat in her office without hitting a CEO or congressional stooge. Everyone knows we’re developing methods to bio-manufacture gasoline replacements. We scream it from the mountaintops as if it’s some miracle cure for our environment. And the petroleum companies say they’re fine with it because they say for them the game is to get ahead of the curve—they say they’ll do better business if bacterial fuel pans out, because then they can cut out the Arab sheiks and the Iranian oil barons. But we all know that’s a crock of crap.”

  “Yes,” Calley said. “The distribution channel will be too expensive—same problem solar and wind has had for years, but even worse, because the capital outlay needed for bacterial fuel’s infrastructure competes directly with gasoline’s.”

  “Exactly.”

  I smiled. One reason we were still friends is that I loved talking with Calley.

  “So,” I said, “the energy companies appear to support the research because it’s great PR for them to play while waiting for solar and wind—which they’ve quietly spent the past decade getting leveraged in up to their asses.”

  “I follow all that. But I don’t understand how this affects your project.”

  “They need their return on those investments now.”

  I was quiet for a moment, letting Calley catch up to my thinking.

  “Your project is a threat because it lets people burn fossil fuel without affecting the climate at all?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It removes the guilt factor. The business world is ready for full-up electric cars, but this would make people want to stick with petroleum power. And it’s not just energy companies. We’ve been talking about them forever, but the automo
tive industry is into this thing just as deeply. They’re probably even a bigger player, really, because they work on such low margins.”

  “Why would you say that? Don’t car companies win if people buy more cars?”

  “You’d think so. But they’ve sunk billions into solar and electrics, too.”

  “I can see that.”

  “One of the reps here last Friday was from Toyota,” I said. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, but she was very interested in the project. I focused on short-string sequencing, thinking that was what she was most wowed by. What an idiot I am. I couldn’t help myself, though. Along the way I told her we had succeeded in getting the CO2 scrubbing to work, and that it was just a matter of time before we learned how to configure the rest of the bacteria properly.”

  “It adds up,” Calley said.

  “Yep. I told a powerful lobbyist in the automotive industry exactly what I had, and one working day later the funding plug was pulled.”

  “It’s probably worse than that,” Calley said.

  I looked at her, leaving my question unspoken.

  “The government has made solar, wind, and hydroelectric power the front of their energy policy for like, forever. Lots of big fish with reputations riding on their success now.”

  I nodded.

  Over the past few years, the Energy Commission had slowed alternate fuel programs at every step—calling scientists to testify on everything from employing unpaid interns to endangering a species by genetically mutating its bacteria.

  “The thing that really gets my goat is that none of this is focused on actually fixing the problem—which is global warming. The clock is ticking, and all anyone cares about is who’s going to get credit or get rich. I mean…even if everyone started buying solar-powered everything from this point on, the roads would still be filled with clunkers that coughed up CO2 for the next twenty or thirty years.”

  We arrived at a corner with a deli. I was suddenly hungry.

  “Want lunch?” I asked.

  “You buying?” Calley smiled, her cheeks bright in the sun.

  “Sure.”

  We went in and ordered.

  “Was she cute?” Calley said.

  “Who?”

  “The Mata Hari from Toyota. Was she cute? Attractive women always get more out of men than they want to give.”

  “Not as cute as you,” I said before I could restrain myself.

  She laughed.

  I felt lighter. Not happy. But better.

  “I can’t fight this,” I said. “I can’t win, and when I lose, I’ll lose my degree—I’ll be blackballed forever. No lab of any repute will accept a renegade.”

  “So, it’s over?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s over.”

  ***

  I waited until after dinner to go back to the lab. I wanted to be alone as I destroyed three years of my life, and I pretty much got my wish. Fergie Nesbit and a freshman I didn’t know were working on a lab trial to create a simple polymer, but otherwise the place was empty. I walked down an aisle of workstations that suddenly felt like they were alive—the gel photography cell, a set of old thermocyclers, a DNA sequencing station, centrifuges, and a collection of other equipment. It was like they were watching me.

  It was not a feeling I enjoyed.

  Three incubators lined the far wall, one of them housing racks of my current batch of spliced R. eutreepa.

  My plan had been to work my way through the hyperthermophile family first—pulling the most promising gene sequences from bacteria known to survive in high-temperature settings, and pasting them into my cache of R. eutreepa until I found one that worked.

  But that was over.

  I went to my computer, opened my folders, then selected all the files. My finger hesitated over the delete button.

  Could I do it? I glanced at the incubators where my bacteria were growing, and I looked at the splicer stations. I glanced at the clock. 7:13 P.M. Monro would be in no later than 9:00 A.M. tomorrow. I knew I had to kill the program, but I had nearly 14 hours.

  The idea emerged so calmly that I wondered if it had always been there.

  Twenty minutes per splice meant I could create the material for nearly 40 trials if I worked nonstop from now until then. They would need to incubate to grow a reasonable test sample, but I had an oven in the apartment. And while I would need to test them at temperatures the average car muffler reached, it shouldn’t be much trouble finding a car in the middle of the city.

  My palms were sweating and my head was buzzing.

  I could do it.

  It took ten minutes to lay out my process, grab my glassware, and get into the flow.

  ***

  Our lab stores carried samples of only sulolobus and methanococcus jannaschii from the hyperthermophile family, but we had a large selection of your garden variety high-temp thermophiles. I grabbed A. herbarius, A. vulcanalis, some stuff from the Moorela genus, and more from the Gelria stash—a grouping I enjoyed because of the Netherlandic heritage we shared.

  I carefully labeled each piece of glassware.

  The simplistic nature of bacteria’s framework makes them remarkably good subjects for genetic studies. But I couldn’t find record of any work done to identify which part of their DNA enabled high-temperature survival, so for each sample I looked at what was known, then stripped chunks of coding from the areas that were blank. One at a time, I spliced these into my R. eutreepa, put the new combination into a dish, and sealed it up.

  Time passed until I heard footsteps in the hallway.

  I was shocked to find it was just past 1:00 A.M.

  The footsteps brought me images of cops taking me away, one putting his hand on my head and pushing me into the back of a cruiser. Or worse, I imagined a team of thugs sent from BP or Exxon or Ford. I looked for a weapon, but my feet were frozen in place.

  The door opened and Calley stepped in, a plastic bag from an all-night sandwich shop in one hand, a bottle of diet Mountain Dew in the other.

  “I thought I’d find you here.”

  “You are a godsend, Calley Buchanan,” I said, suddenly noticing how hungry I had gotten and feeling the rush of a headache I had been trying to ignore.

  “It’s about time you realized it.”

  I looked at her, not sure what she meant. But the sandwich was good, and my body absorbed caffeine from the drink like a sponge.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, scanning the three workstations I had spread out over. Her eyes fell on the shiny Petrie dishes I had already filled.

  “Just getting some work done.”

  “Last I heard, your project was cancelled.”

  “Different project.”

  She snorted. “I’m not stupid, Mark. How can I help?”

  Her eyes were clear and direct, and her lips were set at an angle that I knew better than to argue with. But I tried anyway.

  “Really, Calley, I don’t think that’s very smart. And even if it was, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll just get in the way.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t cut me out of this. Thirty years from now the world is going to see what you’re doing as the most important thing that happened in our time. You’re a good guy, Mark, even if you’re the most oblivious creature on the face of the earth. I’m going to help you. I can’t sequence, but I am a ChemE, remember? I know how to study, and I know how to dig. What’s slowing you down?”

  I felt a pressure fall away from me then, a release so powerful my eyes teared.

  “You know it’s not going to work, right?” I said. “This is a complete shot in the dark. These things can take months, and I’m trying to load it all into one night. They’ll probably all die.”

  “All the more reason to just shut up and tell me how I can help.”

  I bit my lip. “Thank you,” I replied.

  She just stood there with her resolute Calley face on, waiting.

  I pointed to the page of known thermophiles I had
created earlier. “There’s the list of source bacteria. I’ve marked each one off as I’ve finished with it. If you could go through and pull the sequences of the others, that would save me buckets of time.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “Well…then you can scan through the sequence and look for areas that haven’t been studied. I’m working to isolate the ability to survive high temp. I need a page for each test sample that looks like this.” I rummaged through the sheets on my desk and handed her a sample from the A. vulcanalis I had just vivisected. It showed the barren areas that were candidates for genetic sequences that controlled for thermal resistance.

  “Okay. I’ll mark them.”

  She went to the computer.

  I stretched, took a deep pull off the Mountain Dew, and looked at her as she worked. I watched her long fingers rattle over keyboards and her soft, yet determined eyes focus on the screen. She was something special. That was for certain. I’d always known it, but I am an idiot in these things. With a sigh, I returned to my work with renewed fervor.

  ***

  We stopped at 7:00 A.M. to clean the lab up.

  As we left, I reached my hand out to her. I was nervous, I admit. I was worried that maybe I had just fantasized the whole thing. What I knew about girls could be written on a napkin and still leave space to blot a spill, but I smiled at her without saying a word as she took my hand. And with the results of our night’s work in a cardboard box tucked under my arm—thirty-nine dishes padded with sheets of paper between layers—we walked down the hall together.

  I felt happy. Nothing else. Just happy.

  It had rained overnight. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up.

  “What are you going to do with them?” she said.

  “I’ll put them in the oven for a couple days and see what happens.”